Caroline
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Homepage: http://www.constellata.com
Posts by Caroline
The Janus Moment in (BAL)EAP 2013
May 11th
Recently I attended BALEAP’s biennial conference at Nottingham University, which was a great opportunity to catch up with the world of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). I was there with Epigeum to meet potential clients and authors for its forthcoming English for Academic Studies courses. The conference theme was “The Janus Moment” in honour of the Roman god Janus, who presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and thus war and peace. In this case, the organisers were less interested in war, more interested in the analogy of looking back at the development of EAP over the past 40 years, and also looking to the future with the growth of English as a medium of instruction in Higher Education, EAP is becoming an increasingly important area. The conference was busy, lots of participants and great sessions, which you can see from the conference programme, but I was only able to attend a few, More >
IATEFL Failure Fest
May 2nd
I’m ashamed to see how long it is since I last updated this blog, I’ve been busy on some very exciting e-learning projects, and working as a member of the IATEFL Conference committee. One of my highlights was working with Ken Wilson to organise the Failure Fest evening at the Liverpool conference, and reading the various reviews made me feel very proud. I was inspired to suggest the Failure Fest event after attending a similar event of that name organised by Nesta late in 2012, in which presenters shared their experiences of failure and learning in various educational contexts. You can see the video of our event at IATEFL Online.
BGS interview
Nov 22nd
I was honoured to be invited to join BGS in 2011 after my MBA at Cass Business School. As one of their first Cass members, they interviewed me for their Centennial series of interviews, for which they interviewed one member a month. It was a great opportunity for me to reflect on my career to date, and what led me to starting Constellata, and working with Kim, Nadine and Graham on creating our mobile app Word Carrot.
Beta Gamma Sigma (BGS) is a prestigious international honour society for students and staff of business schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International. The founding principles and values of the Society are honour and integrity, pursuit of wisdom, and earnestness. BGS has inducted more than 650,000 students into membership since its founding in 1913, and its e-magazine has a circulation of 170,000 members.
Book Machine interview: 5 questions on mobile language learning
Nov 7th
As you can see from the paucity of entries below, I’ve been busy on other things this year, notably working on Word Carrot with my LearnAhead colleagues. You can see here my recent interview with Sophie O’Rourke from emc design on the Book Machine blog. We had a great discussion in the coffee bar of the British Library last week, talking about the development of Word Carrot and the challenges we have faced as a new and unknown publisher against 700,000 other apps in the Apple App Store. Word Carrot is doing well, we’ve had well over 50,000 downloads of the UK and US versions in the past three months, people are using and updating it and buying more levels.
Welcome to Doki City!
Nov 26th
Posted by Caroline in Comment
A year ago I worked for Eazyspeak on a feasibility study to convert their successful Doki series of language learning CDROMs into iPad apps. This was an ambitious project, as it required the conversion of hundreds of complex interactive Flash-based movies into a format that would work on an iPad (as an aside, they also converted them into iPhone apps for iPhones 4S and 5), and I have discussed the challenges of the project in various events including Online Educa Berlin 2011, IATEFL and the eLearning Symposium at Southampton University in January 2012. I am delighted to say that the team has launched a series of 9 titles globally, offering beginner and intermediate level apps for learners of English, French, German and Spanish. Congratulations to Eazyspeak’s owners and development team: Nicos, Jane, Tasos, Alex, Panos, Louise and Stella, and also Byron Russell, who was a member of the original team and advised them on business development and strategy. They have more plans, so watch this space.